Retreat Fears Number 1
At Casa Torreta Blanca Retreat Venue, our aim is to become seen as the go-to people for coaches wanting to explore running retreats.
A big part of this is demystifying the retreat creation process and, more importantly, debunking and challenging the big retreat fears and objections that hold potential retreat leaders back.
Over the next few blogs, I’m going to look at the main obstacles and give some advice and reassurance about how we deal with them here at Casa Torreta Blanca. These answers are specific to us here and I give no guarantees that other retreat venues operate in the same way!
Fear #1: What if no-one comes
This is the most common fear we hear about.
You invest time and money in creating the perfect retreat and get only 2 bookings, and that’s your mum and sister!
What’s gone wrong? Why can’t people see the value and worth of what you’re offering?
Identify your audience
In 90% of cases the problem is that you haven’t fully identified your audience, your niche for this retreat. And this means your retreat promise (what your attendees are going to get from coming to your retreat) isn’t addressing their needs precisely enough. It’s not talking to them on a deep enough level to make your promise, your offer, not only irresistible but unrefusable!
This also applies if you are a bit wooly on your audience and are trying to appeal to too many people. If you’re trying to sell to everyone, you’re selling to no one.
If you’ve already launched a retreat that’s not selling then it is possible to go back through everything and re-engineer it, but it’s much better to get it right first time round!
Our approach to the retreat planning process
For us, the retreat planning process starts with evaluating which part of your unique skill set you want to use for this retreat, the particular problems it can solve, the questions it can answer or the blocks it can remove. From here you identify your audience and create a retreat promise that is going to talk directly to them and reassure them that you know their problem/pain point/block intimately enough to have the answer/solution they’ve been searching for.
It makes sense to try to find your audience from within those who already know you, but it is possible to target a group of people who have never heard of you, but we’ll talk about this when we deal with not having clients or an audience in a few days time.
Our Retreat Building Bootcamps
This is the first thing we concentrate on in our Retreat Building Bootcamps - laser focusing on your skills, your promise and audience, we call it niche your niche. For some it seems unnecessary, but it does pay dividends in the long run.
Obviously this is a condensed answer to a very big fear/objection and I’d be very happy to answer any questions you may have on this subject.
